Today is the feast of St Mark. In his Lenten reflections, Rowan Williams describes Mark as “a Gospel of silences, of misunderstandings, of indirect and teasing communication,” a Gospel that tells the story of Jesus as the story of a “lifelong passion.” Jesus, in Mark’s vision, stands alone, abandoned—at last, even by God.
One of the governing themes of the way Mark tells the story of these last days is that he constructs a pattern in which Jesus is left more and more visibly alone, repudiated by more and more persons and groups. The disciples run away from him, Peter denies that he knows him, the High Priestly council condemns him, the Roman governor and the soldiers reject and abuse him, and he ends on the cross crying out that God too has abandoned him. The last recorded words of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark are, ‘‘My God, why have you abandoned me?’’ The intensity of that progression in the last pages of Mark is of great significance in understanding the direction and logic of the entire Gospel. Our attention is focused mercilessly on this one figure: as he is progressively set apart from group after group, authority after authority, friend after friend, it becomes clearer and clearer that he alone has to carry the whole meaning, the whole theological and spiritual weight of what is going on. Nobody provides him with a framework for this, no one has written a script for him to perform. He is alone; when he prays in the Garden of Gethsemane, there is no reply from heaven—so that it is not even that he has a ‘‘set of instructions’’ from God the Father to shape his response. God is no longer separate from him. He must, through what he does and suffers, establish what the voice of God and the presence of God might mean in this world…
Mark has none of the sustained drama of John, none of the subtly developed irony that is maintained throughout the whole story; he wants us to see here only the isolation and the sense of arbitrary power closing in. But it is in the middle of all this that Jesus makes his one utterly unambiguous claim. When the High Priest asks (14.61), “Are you the Anointed One, the Son of the Blessed?” Jesus replies, “I am.” The placing of this claim, this breaking of the silence, is all-important. It is when Jesus is stripped of all hope, of all power, when he stands alone in the middle of this meaningless nightmare, with no hope of life, it is then and only then that he declares who he is. And he does so in words that evoke the Divine Name itself. God calls himself I AM when he speaks to Moses in the Hebrew Scriptures (Ex. 3.13)…
The whole Gospel is moving inexorably to this point at his trial before the High Priest. Mark has set aside the idea that we should listen to Jesus because he does wonderful things, even that we should listen to Jesus because he says wonderful things. If we are to listen to what Jesus is saying in his very existence, his mortal flesh, his death, it is something that can happen only when every possibility of hope, of love, of absolution, has apparently been swept away and all that is left is this bare claim...1
In Mark’s Gospel, Christ’s disciples, to a man, forsake Jesus. In Mark’s own words, “All of them deserted him and fled” (Mk 14:50). But Mark is particularly interested in one young lad who had been following Jesus, “wearing nothing but a linen cloth” (Mk 14:51). The crowd that sent out by the authorities with Judas to capture Jesus tried to take this young man, too. But when they “caught hold of him,” he shook free of his cloak and “ran off naked” (Mk 14:52).
This seemingly-insignificant detail is an example of the “indirect and teasing communication” so characteristic of Mark’s storytelling. Although St Jerome identifies him as James, the brother of Jesus, and other Fathers identify him as John the Beloved, the naked fugitive is surely left unnamed for a reason. Speaking literarily, he serves as a symbol of discipleship—the quintessential follower of Jesus, nameless because he is everyone, anyone. In this way, his nakedness exposes not only his impotence but also ours. Amos’ prophecy has been fulfilled again and again in those who have imagined themselves as Jesus’ friends: on the day of judgment, even the mightiest, those most sure of themselves, flee, naked and afraid (Amos 2:16).
But this lad’s story does not end with his humiliation. On Resurrection Day, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome come to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ corpse (Mk 16:1). They do not know how they will remove the stone, but they come anyway. And when they arrive, to their surprise, they find the stone has already been removed. As they enter the tomb, they find themselves confronted by “a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed” (Mk 16:5).
Every detail matters. This young man is no longer fleeing; he’s at rest. He’s no longer naked; he’s robed in white; he’s no longer afraid, although his presence creates alarm. No one tries to apprehend him; instead, he frees these women into their mission. Clearly, he has been changed. How? Because the risen Jesus sought him out first. The women flee from the tomb in terror and astonishment, afraid of being grasped by the impossibility they have witnessed. But the young man—the Evangelist himself!—does not flee. And his words hold space for the return of the women with the apostles.
This, in the end, is why Jesus is left alone: so he can seek out those who abandoned him. And that is why those who are captured by Jesus find that no matter what they cannot give up hope—especially for those who’re hopeless.
God has chosen to be, and to be manifest, at that lowest, weakest point of human experience. And so the poor and the helpless, the condemned and the isolated, reading this story told from the victim’s point of view, can know that God is with them, and that the God who is with them cannot be defeated or deposed from his Godhead… God is not where you thought he was; God is in and with this mortal man, who is helpless and about to suffer a terrible death.2
So, today we give thanks for St Mark and ask him to pray that his Jesus will catch us too.
Rowan Williams, Meeting God in Mark: Reflections for the Season of Lent (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2014), 55-61.
Williams, Meeting God in Mark, 61.